


like a child from a womb, like a ghost from a tomb

by river_of_words



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Body Horror, Dark!13, Dissociation, F/F, Greek Mythology Allusions, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Self-Harm, Spoilers for Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Time Lord Telepathy (Doctor Who), Time Sensitivity, Trauma, christian mythology allusions, idk it's thoschei at their most messed up, or trust and safety, they dont know the difference between violence and intimacy, unhealthy dynamic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:35:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 14,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27371296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: The Doctor isn't the same person after prison. And she has maybe revised her opinions on some prisoners she has kept in the past.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 170
Kudos: 54





	1. prisoner

The buzzing engagement of the containment field, the grinding opening of heavy doors, a stranger that paced around right outside the doors like a tiger in a cage. Missy stood up, apprehensive, ready.

“Get out.” The stranger’s eyes flew through the Vault too fast to register anything, her head moved up and down slightly, rhythmically, as if tracing a circle in the air.

“Who are you?” The fact that she just walked into the Vault like there were no locks at all meant an acquaintance of the Doctor. The fact that she just told Missy to get out did not clarify whether that acquaintancy was a friendly one. To the Doctor _or_ to Missy.

“Unimportant,” the stranger said with a voice that wore wear and tear and disuse as well as its owner wore the ratty red prison uniform. “Get out.” Persistent.

She had restless hands that tugged at the damaged ends of her long hair and restless eyes that seemed to follow the trail of her thoughts and didn’t manage to land on Missy once.

“I don’t listen to strangers.”

The stranger laughed, loud and hollow. “You don’t listen to anyone. I’m not a stranger. Get out.” Desperation sneaking in.

“You know me.” Not a question.

In response only an agitated noise.

“In that case I think it’s only polite to tell me who you are too.”

“Polite?” The stranger nodded to herself, eyes up. “Polite, _polite_.” She tugged her hair so hard it pulled her head askew. “Didn’t come to be polite,” she hissed at the ceiling. “Came to get you out.” Expectant beat. “Get out.”

This wasn’t an opportunity Missy was willing to dismiss out of hand, but Time was moving. Clouds gathering, portenting the snowstorm that would lead to an avalanche. She was wary.

“Why?”

The stranger scoffed, eyes tracing the circumference of the Vault where the walls met the ceiling. “It’s a prison!”

“So?”

Straight past Missy, her eyes hit the piano like an arrow. With her voice like the cracked gravel texture of the stone walls that Missy’s fingertips knew by heart, she said “You want out.”

“Who says?”

The prisoner laughed incredulously, mirthlessly. “You do! Every–” she interrupted herself like something suddenly occurred to her and looked at the vortex manipulator on her wrist. “Yes! Yes. Every day! _Let me out, let me out, please Doctor, I’m good now, you can let me out now, let me out._ ”

A cold wave washed over Missy. The first snow started to fall. “You’re not–”

“What am I not?”

The next words were reluctant, but the Vault was already turning white, this would not change anything about that. “The Doctor?”

The prisoner cocked her head, considering. “No. _Noooo_ , I don’t think so.”

A dozen timelines came loose with a snap. Missy reached out to untangle the telepathic signature the prisoner was giving off. If it was the Doctor, she should be able to tell. The prisoner’s mind closed around Missy’s like fingers around her wrist and her eyes now met Missy’s, piercing with unbearable fire. Missy backed off, hands up in surrender. Time swished around her ankles, everything in flux. The ground shifted. Missy tried to find a safe place to stand.

“What may I call you?”

“You’re not calling me anything,” the prisoner said, “unless you’re coming?” Her eyes were everywhere again but she held out a grimy hand to Missy.

“That’s decided then,” Missy said. She took the prisoner’s hand, the ground gave way beneath them as the vortex manipulator zapped them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is from percy shelley's 'the cloud': https://genius.com/Percy-bysshe-shelley-the-cloud-annotated#lyrics
> 
> playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt7erjOXr1MPYAVD4xzPebKdM3yRkuMWc


	2. the things we run from

They landed in an alley. Nighttime. Same year, not the same day, Missy thought. The probably-Doctor’s fingers dug into Missy’s hand.

“Where's your Tardis?” Missy asked.

“Vortex manipulator not good enough for you?”

“No.”

“Working on it.”

She let go of Missy’s hand, looking around, looking up, like she was looking for something. Listening for something.

“Are you going to tell me your name?”

The prisoner shook her head quickly, dismissing a thought, and turned to Missy, eyes drifting, never quite meeting hers. She chuckled like a growl suppressed. “ _Oooh,_ full of questions! Working on it, working on it.”

Missy crossed her arms, insulted but not enough to do something about it quite yet. She watched the probably-Doctor fuss with her vortex manipulator with scabbed bloody fingers, muttering to herself. She kept moving her head, looking around, closing her eyes, like something was blocking her view, like she couldnt quite see what was in front of her. The vortex manipulator beeped as she entered and re-entered coordinates. Couldn't see, Missy thought, or couldnt _understand._ The way she kept looking at Missy like she couldn't make sense of her. Like she couldn't untangle the timelines.

And Missy was feeling some of that. Things were a bit foggy right now. But this was not that. The probably-Doctor was a lot more confused than this paradox snowstorm they were wading through should be making her. Missy narrowed her eyes.

“Do you...” she started.

The Doctor looked at her sharply.

“Is there... _something_ in your head?” Missy asked slowly.

“Oh yes,” the prisoner said. “Quite a lot of things, I think.”

A laugh escaped Missy. Bloodless humor at the cosmic irony of the universe and a deep, dark vindication.

The prisoner looked at her, expression unreadable.

“I'm sorry, but you just had fifty years to laugh at my expense, allow me this one pleasure.”

The prisoner bristled and focused back on her vortex manipulator.

“I'm not your _Doctor_ ,” she sneered.

“How long has it been for you? Are you the next one up or are there a couple more between him and you?”

“I'm not _HIM_ ,” the prisoner insisted, voice cracking. She turned to Missy, giving her one hard shove back against the wall and leaning her forearm against her chest. “I'm _not_ the Doctor.”

Missy looked at her untamed hair, clothes that someone else had forced on her, bloodshot eyes that had a looping depth, and thought she might agree.

“Who, then?”

The pressure on Missy’s chest lifted slightly as the prisoner looked away, thinking. When she looked back her eyes twinkled. It put Missy in mind of an anglerfish.

“You’re Deathless, aren't you?” she asked. “ _Koschei?_ ”

Missy’s breath caught. The prisoner smirked.

“I’ll be Timeless.” She grinned. “We’ll _match_.”

She stepped back. Missy let out a shuddering breath.


	3. home again, home again

“It’s just that I don’t know when he did it,” the– _she_ was saying, “don’t know when we were there.” She looked back at Missy. “Do you–? No, of course you don’t.” She looked up at the night sky in exasperation, at who Missy couldn’t tell. “Of _course_ you don’t! That’s not the right order! It’s not the right order.” She changed the coordinates on her vortex manipulator one last time.

“Alright. A guess. But a good guess. Maybe.” Her hand struck out snake-like, irrefutable, sharp nails biting into Missy’s skin, and she grinned. “ _My turn_.”

The distant rumbling of the avalanche of Time crashing down turned into the roaring sound of flames. The Do– Timeless yelled triumphantly, her voice drowned out by the chaos around them.

“Got it in one!”

She looked back at Missy, who stumbled at the sight in front of her. The Timeless, holding onto her hand, prevented her from falling over, forced her to stay upright. When Missy managed to drag her eyes away from the burning Citadel she looked right into the Timeless’s hungry eyes, in which she could now recognise the same flames.

Missy pulled her hand out of the Timeless’s grasp, stepped away, away.

“What have you _done_?” Her voice was hoarse and not her own.

“Oh, no!” The Timeless laughed. “No no no no no! This–” she spread her arms and twirled around, “–this was _all_ you!” She leapt forward, filling Missy's range of vision. “Aren’t you proud? Finally managed it? _Feel like a god?_ ” She shuddered and turned, clapping her hands. “Let’s go find ourselves a Tardis.”

Before she could walk away, Missy grabbed her arm. She viciously twisted herself loose.

“ _Get off me!_ ”

“Tell me what happened,” Missy _didn’t_ beg. Demanded. She _demanded_.

The Doctor ignored her, walked away. “We’re here to get a Tardis, that’s all.”

Missy looked at the inferno ahead. “There won’t be any working ones left.”

“Yes, there will. This is before.”

“Before _what?_ ”

She turned around so abruptly that, were it not for the look in her eyes, Missy would have walked into her. Instead, she froze. The air between them filled with static, heavy and tingling like a limb fell asleep. The Timeless looked at her and Missy felt something she hadn’t felt in a very long time; young.

The Timeless, older, wiser, said, “You don’t want to know.”

“I think I do.”

Something changed in the Timeless. If pressed, Missy wouldn’t have been able to say what. She shifted; a latch unfastened, a door swung open, a muscle slackened. A belief let go of. Nothing changed, and yet it did. The difference between calm seas and tsunamis doesn’t lie in the water.

“Okay,” she said slowly, carefully, walking a tightrope that Missy couldn’t see. “Okay, I’ll show you.” She was about to turn around again when something ocurred to her. “Oh, but you will _regret_ this.” She smiled. “You will regret it.”


	4. this is not a story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw child abuse, emotional abuse, medical abuse (all implied more than shown) and one metaphorical use of cancer

She dragged Missy through the ruined city, pointing out destruction with misplaced cheer and words that didn’t seem to fit her mouth. Words that floated through Time like metastasised cancer cells through a body, unmoored and corruptive. Sentences with a pull like gravity, warping space-time around the two of them. Missy felt herself mouthing along, felt how the words _did_ fit _her_ mouth. Like she’d said them before. Like she _might_ have said them? In another time... Another way...

“After you.”

With a mocking bow, the Doctor–

“Ah!”

–the _Timeless_ –

“Better.”

–let Missy into the Matrix chamber first. She walked in slowly, her feet gripped by an involuntary reverence for the status of this place, the grandeur, while her head spun and her hearts swelled with the glory of seeing it wrecked. The inviolable, violated. The eternal, ended. And she, the Master, stood in its wreckage. Untouched. Victorious. Outlived her empire, _survived_ her empire. She breathed in smoke and heard the silence. She turned around to see the Doctor still at the top of the stairs.

“You were wrong.” Her voice carried to the top of the stairs but the tremor in it didn’t. “I do _not_ regret seeing this.” She walked back up the stairs, felt her legs shake and her blood turn into water. Her breath came in jagged gasps. The only thing better might have been watching it happen, watching it all fall, watching them all die. The king was dead, long live–

Her eyes met the Doctor's. Frozen in the arched doorway. So many conflicting impulses warring for control that the net result was... stillness. A stillness so painfully full of movement it was about to burst. A stillness made of movement like a net is made of rope.

Missy took the Doctor’s hand and turned her around, pulled her back into the hallway until the wall hid the Panopticon from them. And just like that, the spell was broken. The Doctor gasped and folded like someone having a giggle fit. When she looked up at Missy her mouth was laughing but her eyes were not.

“Was that all?” Missy asked. “Someone–”

“ _You_.”

“I don’t remember that, but fine, _I_ thrashed the Matrix. Big deal.” A shiver went up her spine. Blasphemy _and_ a lie. The blood hot excitement was draining away to leave her with a blank white emptiness. Peace. The best she’d ever had. And she didn’t even have to kill anyone for it.

“Not the Matrix,” the Doctor corrected. “Not the Matrix, the Matrix _chamber._ ”

“And the rest of the city. So?”

The Doctor’s eyes glinted in the low light, she whispered, “There’s still more to see!”

So there was. The Doctor grabbed Missy’s hand and led her back down into the Matrix chamber, one impulse apparently having won out over all the others. She pushed Missy up on the platform and before she could take a breath to prepare herself, shoved her off the deep end.

* * *

Oppressive, disorienting dark. No up or down or here or there. No now. No you or me. Just, _us._ And a voice. From everywhere around, from inside herself.

Words. An onslaught of words. No sense to them, no order. _Some_ sense to them, if you didn’t listen. If you didn’t try. Didn’t try to understand. Didn’t look for a story. There isn’t one. There wasn’t one. Nowhere to start, nowhere to go. Nowhere to end.

Fragments of _something_. A sudden direction to the space, a wall at her back, nowhere to go, nowhere to run. Light. She can’t see. Hands. Prodding her arms, her chest, her head. **Pain**.

And a voice.

“Good girl, you’re being so brave.”

She resists.

 **Pain**.

And a voice.

“Good girl, you’re going to help so many people.”

She resists.

 **Pain**.

And a voice.

“I’m so proud of you.”

She crumples.

Direction disintegrates. She’s falling.

Words. An onslaught of words. No sense to them, no order. Only screaming.

* * *

Missy opened her eyes, rough grass pricking her cheek, and looked up into dark eyes.

“Having fun yet?”

She opened her mouth but the words had to come from far. “No,” she whispered. And then more forceful as panic flooded her, made her sit up, “No!”

The Timeless... – something lodged in Missy’s chest, dug its tiny claws into her flesh and nestled right between her hearts – ...The _Timeless Child_ scoffed.

“I have it on good authority.”

Missy leaned on her hands and knees, tried to breathe around the thing in her chest. She was poisoned, it was poisoning her, leaking its sacrilegious fluids into her blood. She coughed, she sobbed, she gagged; it did not leave. What she didn’t try, was talk.

“You done?” The Doctor looked down on her. “Still have some more to show you.”

“ _NO,_ ” Missy shrieked, grabbing the Doctor’s ankle. If it was between her dignity and her self, she knew what she was choosing, what she always chose. “ _Stop._ Doctor!”

The Doctor yanked herself free and knelt down in front of Missy. “I am _not_ the Doctor.”

Missy grabbed her wrist, dug her nails in deep enough to draw blood. “Fine, _fine,_ I don’t care, just let me out.” The Doctor stared at her with dark empty eyes. “LET ME OUT!”

A smile danced around the Doctor’s mouth, small, coy, and dripping in venom. “My, my, doesn’t _that_ sound familiar.”

“Don’t let me see any more,” Missy didn’t demand, she begged. She begged. “Don’t let me see it. Let me out. Let me out, I don’t want to see any more.”

The Doctor looked at Missy’s fingers around her wrist and slowly took Missy’s face in her hands. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Missy’s a few times before she said, “Seems you were right.”

Missy swallowed.

“We’re not so different.”

The Doctor’s rough scabbed fingertips scraped against Missy’s face when she dropped her and stood up.

“Coward.”

“ _Yes._ I know, I know, I’m a coward, let me out now. I can’t see any more, I don’t want to see any more.”

One blink of impassive eyes.

“Tough.”

The Doctor snapped her fingers.


	5. nothing beside remains

Missy knew her limits. Most of the time they lay safely in the distance but she knew when they were close, and she knew where they were reached.

They had been reached.

The Timeless Child had pierced the thin translucent membrane that was stretched over the smoke-and-mirror filled shell that Missy used to conjure up a self. The membrane had torn, the smoke had cleared, the mirrors had shattered and left a kaleidoscope. And in every fragment reflected: The Timeless Child.

Missy looked up at her. Sharp rubble pricked her hands and knees. They were back in the Matrix chamber.

“Okay.” The Timeless Child studied her and, apparently satisfied with what she found, said, “That was all.”

Missy opened her mouth, reached for fire, anger, old comforts. They dissolved in her mouth and before she could mould the cold mush into words, the Timeless spoke again.

“We’re leaving.”

She didn’t wait for a response. Turned around and bounded up the stairs. Missy stood up, feeling like she was doing so in a different body than the one she fell down in. She wiped her hands on her skirt and pushed her devils back in their box, stitching the membranes of her drums back together. Or maybe just summoning enough words to be able to pretend.

She stepped off the platform, let her eyes drift through the room one last time. They landed on a broken statue. Two legs uselessly sticking up where the torso had fallen off. Missy walked over and looked down into Rassilon’s shattered stony face. She put her heel in one of the cracks and leaned until his head crumbled. Eye, mouth, collar; options. She knelt and picked up a piece from the collar, ran her thumb over its sharp edges before putting it in her pocket.

As soon as she walked into the Tardis, the Timeless, lingering impatiently at the edge of the console room, said, “You’re driving.”

Missy didn’t miss a beat as she took her place at the console. “Where?”

“Away.”

The Timeless vanished into the depths of the new and unfamiliar Tardis and Missy closed the doors.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw disease imagery and mild body horror

Missy parked them somewhere they wouldn’t be bothered and then took her hands of the controls and walked slowly backwards until her back met the wall and she sank down to the floor.

She felt like a balloon full of blood, surrounded by nails. Her hearts swollen. Her skin itching, burning, pulling. Her head crushed in the tightening knot of the paradox they were still spinning. Her stomach throbbed, filling with the toxins of the knowledge she'd _asked_ to be infected with. The forbidden fruit was rotten and its intoxication was not a pleasant daze.

She laid her head on her knees and wrapped her arms around her thighs. She felt sick. Sicker than she’d ever felt. She felt _like a sickness._ An agent of corruption, corrupted and corruptive. A stain that was spreading. A virus that couldn't help but replicate ad nauseam.

Incessantly, relentlessly, helplessly.

 _Helplessly_.

If she cried it was only because toxins need to be secreted to be of any use. If she breathed it was only because her miasmic breath was straining her ribcage with the demand to contaminate. Her septic blood pounded against its walls. Her fevered flesh wanted nothing to do with her, squeezed her out, had her slipping between guts and liver and heart and brain, had her tumbling through her nervous system.

No space.

There was no space for her in this unhallowed temple. No space and no time.


	7. Chapter 7

Missy found the Timeless in a corridor. Liminality embodied as she rocked back and forth, demonstrating how perpetual motion could be found in inaction like infinity could be found in the number one.

One hand on the doorknob she was about to open while the other scratched a singular mark in the wall next to it. She was counting, but never got past one.

She was a buzzing fly stuck in an amber second. Time twisting itself more and more broken around her head like a spinning screw.

Missy watched her for a while. Wondered whether it would break on its own, and if so, how long it would take. One second, she supposed. For the Timeless at least. Not so much for Missy. When the wall was staining rusty brown and Missy’d got bored, she went back to the console room. She had only one idea. But, she thought, a pretty decent one. She pulled the navigation screen toward her. Shouldn’t be too hard to find a music store to plunder.

* * *

Back on their little privacy planet – or, The Planet of Not _Fucking_ Now, as Missy had started calling it in her head – with a room full of musical instruments. This Tardis flew incredibly smoothly. She’d simply materialised an empty room around the store and dematerialised again, keeping all the instruments, but nothing else. It ranked high on Missy’s personal list of quickest robberies. The flight had been frictionless too, you could barely feel yourself move. None of that wheezing and groaning business. It was better than a lot of Tardises Missy had had, definitely better than the Doct–

Strings! Something with nice blurry lines between its notes. Something that flowed, something that couldn’t get stuck. Missy picked up a violin; they’d played that before.

She found the Timeless where she’d left her. _When_ she’d left her too, stuck in her looping second. Missy took a breath and bowed the violin, played one note. It wasn’t much, this wasn’t her instrument, but it was fluid, and definitely longer than a second. The Timeless’s grip around the doorknob tightened.

That was enough for Missy; hypothesis confirmed. She shoved the violin at the Timeless, pulled her bloody hand away from the wall and wrapped it clumsily around the neck. Then she wrenched her right hand from the doorknob and handed over the bow.

“Play it.”

When the Timeless didn’t respond except for the incessant repetition of her count of one, Missy gave her a push.

“Play it, come on. I suck at violin.”

Still nothing. She groaned in frustration and moved the Timeless arm to make the bow touch the strings. Missy guiding her hand, they played the first note together. Once that note crossed the threshold of her temporal cell, the Timeless thawed immediately. All that energy, all that motion stored up in her, flowed out as if a vein had been opened. The amount of Time that had been coiling up in her, now crashing off of her in waves, staggered Missy. She stepped back.

The Timeless played for a while. It wasn’t anything Missy recognised. She sat on the floor and just watched. Watched how Time moved around her. The release of however many seconds that had got stuck and stacked inside of her, the pressure of it, the force. But she also saw Time starting to coil again, like a snake around her head and neck. Every second twisting onto the last, not leaving any space for the next.

After the last note had rung out, the Timeless lowered the violin and met Missy’s eyes. She looked drenched, drained, like she’d stood under a waterfall, but her eyes were clearer, focused. They looked at each other for a moment, then Missy sat up and beckoned her. The Timeless put down the violin and bow and crossed the corridor to sit on her knees in front of Missy.

“Show me,” Missy said.

She leaned forward willingly when Missy put their heads together.


	8. Chapter 8

The moment they made contact, the paradox that had already been constricting Missy’s brain tightened and grew thorns. She gasped and the Timeless grabbed her wrists, denied her the relief of separation. Instinctively she resisted, tried to pull away. That only made the thorns in her brain and the nails in her wrists dig deeper. And she wanted to know, so, with considerable effort of will, she gave in, closed her eyes and surrendered to the pain.

A spiny grey cloud of static spread beneath her skin, starting in her fingertips and at the bottom of her skull and creeping up until her every thought was accompanied with a harsh pinching buzzing.

She waded through the static, encountered the Timeless’s consciousness like a bump on the ground and tripped, fell into a spiralling stack of seconds that started spinning her around like a spider does its prey. Tough strands of recycled Time wrapped around Missy’s chest and throat and head, made her– made her– made her– made her– made her–

The buzzing intensified, generated heat like friction, and somewhere from far away, the Timeless’s laughter poked through. Missy jolted back, opening her eyes. The buzzing hushed and Time unfurled into its regular gentle Möbius-wreathe. She exhaled softly, meeting the Timeless’s eyes. She had let go of Missy’s wrists but was scooting closer.

“Come on, try again!” the Timeless said, with a slanted grin that played a careless game on the knife’s edge between teasing and threatening. “Not _scared,_ are you?”

Missy scoffed and took the Timeless’s face in her hands more forcefully than necessary. She glared until their foreheads were pressed together and she couldn’t see anymore for how cross-eyed she was. She held her breath and dove into the static, ignored the way she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything but buzzing. Ignored the way she didn’t quite know when she crossed the porous boundary from her mind into the Timeless's. She squeezed past the trap of the treacherous second and its hunger for replication and spread out. Let the roots of her untwist and find their way into every dirt-filled crevice of the Timeless’s mind.

She swept through swaths of fragmented memories with a whip-sharp touch, ignoring the way the Timeless flinched and squirmed, until she brushed against something that made them both scream in pain. The Timeless’s fingers dug into Missy’s wrists again and, breathing fast, Missy sank her teeth deeper into the Timeless’s mind. She wasn’t about to get kicked out now. She reached out again, carefully, in the direction of the disturbance, and found a wound barely closed. A fingertip tied off with a piece of string. Tight skin ready to burst. She barely had to touch it to make the Timeless hiss in pain.

Missy released her vice-grip on the Timeless’s mind and let herself drift through the empty grey space, circumscribed by a blanket of static and devoid of anything except fragments of memories severed from their context. The only Time she could feel was The Second. One second repeating over and over while the rest of the universe was sealed off in one throbbing little corner of one desperate little mind that could never dare to contain it all.

She retreated slowly, let the static engulf her and then drain from her head and fingers as she dropped her hands. When she opened her eyes, the Timeless was staring at her.

“You think I have a small mind?”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw physical violence, body horror

Missy didn't remember how it had started. Who had struck first and who had retaliated with an eagerness bordering on gratitude. It had been coming, that was for sure. For days or weeks or whatever unit of measurement you wanted to take. They'd stopped keeping track of time after the Timeless had made it clear to Missy that to her there was only Now. She couldn't deal with anything else.

_“How long–?”_

_“Since when–?”_

She’d bristle at Missy’s questions, ignore them, turn around and leave the room, giving Missy a shove on the way out. So she’d stopped asking, accepted this was where they lived now. Timeless limbo.

It was a cohabitation made of sharp edges; scissors on knives. They kept cutting into each other, accidentally or on purpose. The distinction was unclear.

They’d been stewing in a bashful sort of bloodlust. One that didn't dare meet eyes but had no qualms arming innocent questions with teeth, soaking incidental touches in threat, and solicitation. They didn't push, only lost their balance. They didn't hit, just didn't realise the other had been standing so close. And all the while gunpowder tangled in their hair.

One spark was all it took. Missy didn't remember what it had been. Or when. Only remembered echoing footsteps through metal corridors, the chased and the chaser’s in unison, she remembered her own panting breath and the Timeless's panicked laughter.

They came to a momentary halt in a meaningless living room - two sofas, small table, (vase,) bookshelf, fireplace, (fire iron) - one of dozens they’d passed through and wrecked in their pursuit. From opposite sides of the room, they eyed each other. The Timeless had changed out of her prison uniform ages ago, but had stuck with red as her predominant colour. Black trousers were ripped, red shirt showed brown stains. She stood hunched over, hand pressed against the side that Missy had rammed a coat rack into, but was smirking cockily all the same as she pushed her knotted hair from her face. Her chuckle was wet and roiling.

The space between them moved like honey while Missy’s blood raced. The Timeless would go for the vase; to prevent Missy from using it, not to use it herself. The Timeless liked to use her hands.

For Missy, the fire iron next to the fireplace was calling to her. She kept her eyes darting between the Timeless and the vase, her hands carefully still, not letting her body betray her intentions while the iron sang to her songs about cold metal tips and hot pliable skin. Songs about resistance that breaks with a snap and a rip. About an intrusion so comprehensive that she could never be removed again.

Missy _would_ use her hands for that. Her fingers would be ravishing. Her touch inescapable. She would take in her clutches stomach and spleen and kidneys and liver. She would burrow up behind the bars of the cage and find two hearts to re-appropriate. She would sever the strings with which they clung to their integrity, the fibers which defined them.

She would skin this temple, desecrate its consitution. Lay its organs out in rows. Dismantle it so thoroughly that as it reverted into non-existence it would extricate itself from Missy and leave her hollowed.

(hallowed)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw physical violence

They leapt for the vase at the same time. The Timeless kicked it out of the way as she used the table as springboard to land on Missy, sending them both crashing to the floor. The Timeless had the advantage of gravity and wiry hands eager to strangle but Missy was noticeably stronger and, leveraging her knee between them, flipped the Timeless on her back. Now _she_ had the advantage of gravity _and_ the superior upper body strength. What she didn't have was any sharp objects within arm's reach. 

Holding her pinned by her shoulders, Missy shoved her knee into the Timeless's stomach. She spasmed, eyes and mouth wide but silent. Missy pressed her knee in deeper. Her inability to break skin was profoundly unsatisfying. Keeping one knee in her stomach Missy took her hands off the Timeless's shoulders to ram them full force into her chest in a perversion of cpr. There was a crack. The Timeless's sharp fingers clawed at Missy's face and managed to grab hold of her hair. She yanked Missy down, getting her on the floor and rolling away.

They sat barely a meter apart, breathless and throbbing and inevitable. Neither of them struck first this time _._ It wasn't a striking out at all. More of a taking. Furious fingers scraping over stubborn skin, demanding to _give back what you took from me._ Trying to dig out the seeds of themselves that had sprouted in each other. Like their roots were not woven all throughout each other. Like this would not end in blood. Like this violent dispossession would equate to healing. To mending. To giving. To permission.

The Timeless's uncompromising teeth caught Missy's wrist. Wet heat radiated down her arm. She wrenched the Timeless's hand from her hair and took back what the Timeless felt free to steal from her. Giving flesh, unyielding bone, witholding life.

Meeting the Timeless's eyes and saying more than they'd said to each other in living memory, Missy swallowed a mouthful of blood and saliva. 

Her own force threw Missy backwards when the Timeless let her go. Before she could get up, the Timeless was on top of her again. With the vase in her hands. She grinned as she lifted the the vase over her head and everything went black.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw self-harm! specifically cutting.  
> also the sort of implication of abuse i think? being told you have to be "fixed"? timelords make bad parents and the vault was a bad time. it's very vague and might only be there if youre me and have my headcanons and ideas about the master.

After being reminded of the extent of each other’s fury, and knowing it hadnt been the worst each of them could do by far, they kept their distance for a bit.

Restless, Missy haunted the corridors, never entering any rooms as she tried to get over her concussion and bruised pride. One was easier than the other. She thought the Tardis had taken pity on her, or on them, because she hadn't seen the Timeless once since she’d woken up.

Her thumb grazed the sharp ridges of the broken crown she kept hidden in her pocket. Every brush a resistant crackle. How easily this skin broke. It stung.

She sat down on the floor, back against the wall, untied her shoes, unlaced them. She’d lost her jacket long ago, her sleeves were torn and stiff. With sticky fingers, she traced the mark of the Timeless’s teeth in her wrist. Recently closed, and reluctantly so. Taut, healed despite itself, this skin wanted to be open. As all skin did, when it came down to it. How gladly it would split at even the slightest provocation. At a touch. A request. A promise. A betrayal. It would open itself, like Pandora her clay chest, and let its golden secrets flow. Blood and wind.

Stupid child had let out sickness, let out death. Passed on her curse. _Deathless_. Ha. Death _full_. Stuffed to the brim with death, Koschei was. So full of death she spent all her time trying to keep herself from bursting. The tiniest injury, the smallest slight, and it gulfed out of her, brilliant death, pulled itself from her body, forced her to disown herself, only to push itself back into her, alien and wrong, making _her_ alien. And _wrong._ Without her request, without her control, without her _permission_ , it filled her cracks with gold, kintsukuroi, pretending this was noble, pretending this was divine, pretending this was _right,_ that this was _Good._

Stolen breath got stuck between stolen ribs. Coughing, Missy saw gold dust in the air. This was nonsense. Her mind playing tricks. It did that. Hearts like drums, cages like coffins, friendship like–

_the slightest provocation._

She took the rock out of her pocket, turned it over in her hand, finding its sharpest edge. The frontline of integrity ironically did not have much skin in the game when it came to what it would allow to pass. What it would allow the threaten, to corrupt, to _break–_

With a greedy crown, she traced the mark of the Timeless’s teeth in her wrist. Newly open, eagerly so. She said so, didnt she? Skin _wants_ to be open.

The time between heartbeats is infinite.

But then it welled, it swelled within her. Time was ticking now. Time was always ticking in her. Her inheritance.

She regripped it. Swifter this time. Crack crack, snap snap. Time was ticking. She needed to unmake herself before it could repair her noble.

Because the frontline that defended Me from Not-Me had its own intentions. Did not care about Me, did not care about Missy. Had no stakes in the vain battle to hold con(s)t(r)ained the narrative of a person. The whirling insubstantiality of particles that arranged just so would give the illusion of coherence. Like a card trick.

_Is this your card?_

Queen of spades.

It was. It had been.

It had been.

She retraced the mark of the Timeless. The gold dust was no trick this time. Veins of gold ore in the caves of her flesh. She snarled.

Again.

Crack crack, snap snap, slash slash. Branch out. Follow the lines of genealogy over her skin. Follow them back to the beginning.

Her pounding hearts were sinking in gold now. She could feel it. Pressing out, demanding. _I can help you, I can fix this._

Again!

Slash slash. Do the other arm too. She did the other arm too and then dropped her trembling hand and light head against the wall. Her broken crown rolled away.

She closed her eyes, she clenched her teeth, her legs shook with the effort of controlling it. Of not letting it fix her. Of not letting it repair her noble, pretend good. Let her be bad, let her be bad, let her be bad. Let her be _unacceptable._ Let her be broken. Let her be ugly. Let her be ruinous. Let her be ruinous. Let her be ruinous.

Thick hot tears trailed her cheeks and she’ll be _damned_ if they are golden. She’ll. be. _damned._ She’ll damn herself. She almost reached for her crown back, one last scratch, take out the eyes too, but her arms wouldn’t cooperate. Arms too heavy, fingers too weak.

She swallowed the taste of death and spurting Time and grimaced. Bubbling, brimming, bursting with it, didn't she say? _Bursting_.

A tremor shook her, overtook her. All her cracks lit up golden. She shuddered, she snarled.

_Alright._

_Alright then._

Have it your way then. When did she get her way anyway? She should be used to it by now.

Another tremor and she slid sideways down the wall. It slipped into her brain as she lay down. A trickle warm, and soft, and treacherous. Anaesthetic.

 _Sleep_ , it whispered. _Sleep and we’ll fix you. Nothing Bad will happen here. You're in Good hands. You're in Good hands. You're in Good hands. Sleep. Let yourself. Be fixed. Sleep._

Missy tried to open her eyes but the dark was too alluring. One last sigh. And she slept.


	12. Chapter 12

Missy, Deathless, returned to consciousness under the reassuring cover of gentle violin music. When she opened her eyes, the voice that came with it was less reassuring, though possibly still aiming for gentle. The Timeless’s voice was still cracked and jagged and rough like stone cell walls.

“Hello sleeping beauty.” 

Missy scrambled away.

“You’re looking well. Positively _glowing_.”

Missy rolled her eyes and sat up.

“Didn’t realise I hit you so hard, thought you had a thicker skull.”

Missy scowled at her and glanced at the small heap of clean clothes on the floor next to her. She looked back at the Timeless, who hadn’t stopped playing.

“How long was I asleep for?”

For a long moment, the Timeless didn’t answer. Missy thought she _wouldn’t_ answer. _How long?_ Bad question. The bow flew and her fingers danced as the music sped up. Then it relaxed again.

“I,” the Timeless said slowly, “have played through almost the entirety of Paganini’s Centone di Sonata since I sat down.”

Missy nodded, looking back at the clothes, deep blue, black, blue in the right light.

“For you,” the Timeless said simply. Lightly. Her eyes steadfastly avoiding Missy’s. Missy pulled the clothes closer to investigate.

“Didn’t realise you knew him.”

“I–” the Timeless tripped, her fingers and tongue both, it was a strange sight, as if a record in her brain skipped. She didn’t continue her sentence, and was so absolute in her pretense of never having started one that Missy began to doubt it too.

Using the Timeless’s pretense and sudden hyperfocus on her violin as cover, Missy dared look at her arms. The blood was still there, but the skin underneath was new and even. Against better judgement she reached out. Her touch struck through her like a lightning bolt and cleaved her hearts in two. She tried not to gag and looked away. Directly at the Timeless in front of her. That wasn’t better. Involuntarily her eyes flit across the floor. Where she’d dropped the piece of rock. It wasn’t there. She looked back at the Timeless, who returned her gaze with feigned innocence.

“I believe you have something of mine,” Missy said coolly, evenly, so as not to betray how she felt chilled to the bone and yet her blood was boiling.

“I don’t know what thing you’re talking about,” the Timeless said pleasantly.

Missy launched herself at her. Grabbed the violin and bonked her over the head with it. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to disorient her for a few seconds while Missy pulled a string off the violin. When the Timeless looked like she could see again, Missy was ready to wrap the string around her neck.

“Okay!” the Timeless yelled, already surrendering. “Okay, stop, stOP–” her voice cut off as Missy managed to get behind her and pull the string tight. The Timeless hit her in the face a couple of times and then reached into her pocket and offered Missy the piece of stone. Missy let her go and took it. The Timeless glared at her as she snatched her violin back and held out her hand.

“Trade?”

Missy rolled her eyes and gave her the string back. It was only a _little_ bloody, it would still sound fine. Probably.


	13. Chapter 13

Their cohabitation developed from scissors on knives to gravel between teeth. Abrasive but... acquiescent. It wasn’t that they couldn’t live with each other so much as they couldn’t live with themselves. And they didn’t know how to live with the pieces of themselves that they saw when they looked at each other.

So they didn’t see each other much. Had found rooms, wings, entire decks, for themselves. But their disparate wanderings crossed paths more and more often, with, Deathless suspected, the help of the Tardis.

A tentatively shared ten minutes in the music room, studiously avoiding each other’s eyes as they pretended not to be playing together, before one of them scrammed. A silent five minutes in the kitchen as they waited for the water to boil. Timeless nervously moving utensils and spices that they'd never bought around on the counter. Missy poured for them both.

They stayed on their little planet of privacy. There was no one here. No one even in this galaxy. No one to need anything from them. Nothing to demand their attention. Nothing but space and time for them. Nothing for them. But time and space.

Feeling the walls of infinite rooms starting to close in on her, Missy had opened the Tardis doors. A small transgression, letting a bit of the universe outside into their universe inside, a tiny challenge. What she was met with was a sunny day and a grassy field full of flowers. It didn’t look all that bad. A gentle breeze carrying the scents of an alien spring blew through her blouse and made her shiver. She hadn’t worn a proper outfit in forever, her hair was down, she wasn’t wearing shoes. Involuntarily she looked around, as if she was about to be caught with a secret, and then she stepped out.

The ground and grass were giving beneath her feet, welcoming. Her eyes fell shut and her next breath, aided by alien spring, was gentle in her chest. Didn’t make her feel sick. Didn’t make her feel bad. Didn’t make her feel Good. It just let her be.

Deathless, Missy, had been laying in the grass for a while, to see how long the days last here, she told herself, when there was a noise behind her. She sat up abruptly, saw Timeless standing on the threshold, leaning forward like a bird on a branch, about to take flight, but keeping her feet decidedly inside the doors. The Deathless took a deep breath and cleared her throat.

“You can come out, it’s nice.” Her voice sounded different floating over the waves of white flowers.

Timeless bounced on the threshold, back and forth, and Deathless was sure she was about to vanish inside when she did the opposite and shot out the door, carried by her own momentum. She almost tripped but caught herself and landed next to Deathless in the grass. Deathless scooted over a bit, and then, keeping her eye on Timeless, lay back down.

They sat quietly for a while, Timeless stretching out her legs and spreading her fingers out in the grass, Deathless watching her. Eventually the wonder, the joy, the _relief_ of the outside, of freedom, shifted into something sharper, darker, bitterer. Deathless felt it like a cloud passing in front of the sun.

Timeless was looking at the flowers with a still fascination that by a passerby would have been mistaken for admiration. A fury illegible. A pain twisted into desperate contempt. Into scarred fingertips and broken nails and ruthless hands methodically, invasively, pushing into the dirt.

Missy sat up.

The roots resisted surfacing with all their might, struggled like rabbits wriggling out of hunter’s jaws. With a disaffected jerk Timeless exposed them to the sunlight that casted her face in harsh shadows too. She looked up at Missy with a grin, eyes black pools of still water. Missy wondered what the flowers were called. She thought of narcissuses.

Timeless stood up and wiped her hands on her clothes.

“You’re right,” she said. “This _is_ nice.”

“Nice,” Missy echoed quietly as Timeless went back inside. She had left a battlefield of upturnt soil and crushed flower petals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so narcissus right?
> 
> "The classic version is by Ovid, found in book 3 of his Metamorphoses (completed 8 AD); this is the story of Echo and Narcissus. One day Narcissus was walking in the woods when Echo, an Oread (mountain nymph) saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?" She eventually revealed her identity and attempted to embrace him. He stepped away and told her to leave him alone. She was heartbroken and spent the rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of her. Nemesis (as an aspect of Aphrodite), the goddess of revenge, noticed this behaviour after learning the story and decided to punish Narcissus. Once, during the summer, he was getting thirsty after hunting, and the goddess lured him to a pool where he leaned upon the water and saw himself in the bloom of youth. Narcissus did not realize it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were somebody else. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually realized that his love could not be reciprocated and he melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white flower." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)
> 
> and also: "from Greek narkissos, a plant name, not the modern narcissus, possibly a type of iris or lily, associated with Greek narkē "numbness" (see narcotic (n.)) because of the sedative effect of the alkaloids in the plant" https://www.etymonline.com/word/narcissus?ref=etymonline_crossreference
> 
> i just think thats neat (:


	14. Chapter 14

They started travelling again. A little bit. Short trips. They went to touristy spots, walked around them for a bit. They watched each other furtively, dancing around each other like magnets, figuring out where they stood, who they were, _how_ they were. Together. And then they went back home to the Tardis. It was nice. It was simple. No distress calls, no help needed.

Until one day it was. A problem in the city they were in, chaos, people screaming. The moment she realised what was happening, Missy’s hearts started racing, a series of cogs in her brain clicked together and started turning. She _coalesced._ The last years forgotten, reversed. She knew exactly who she was. She knew exactly who she was with. Something crystalised in her head and everything was suddenly so clear, it was unimaginable how she could ever have forgotten this person, this life.

She glanced at the Doctor, expecting a reprimand, a warning, but she just looked bored.

No, not bored.

Passive. Like something behind her eyes wasn’t quite running at the same frequency as the world outside. Definitely not at the same frequency as Missy. She held out her hand to Missy, a silent question. _Take me home._

Missy’s mouth fell open. Despite herself, she asked as she came closer, “Aren’t you going to help?”

“Why should I?” she spit, surprisingly bitter.

“Because you’re–” Missy cut herself off and looked down at the Doctor's outstretched hand. She quietly took it.

“ _What?_ ”

Missy looked at her and tried not to grin. “What. _Exactly_.” She swallowed and looked into the Doctor’s empty eyes. “Do you want to...” she hesitated, “see something _else_ pretty?”

She held the Doctor’s, Timeless’s, Doctor’s eyes, breathing fast.

The Doctor shrugged and nodded. Missy wasn’t sure whether her squeezing Missy’s hand was deliberate.

They saw some other cities after that. Cities and planets. Lots of domes, coincidentally. Lots of red and gold, coincidentally.

They stood on a hilltop, a lookout point in some meaningless city on some meaningless planet in a meaningless galaxy that nobody had ever cared about. Utterly inconsequential. Never done anything remotely notable. Their dome glittered in the light of their suns.

“Pretty,” the Doctor said, voice flat.

“Isn’t it.”

Two beings outside of time and outside of death should not be left unsupervised in the universe.


	15. Chapter 15

Having seen enough pretty things, having felt the ugly things inside themselves grow, they vanished into their separate corners of the Tardis without a word or a glance.

Missy – Missy still – questioned her motives as she paced the uniform corridors, quick and directionless. What _had_ she been doing, taking the Doc– _Timeless_ , Timeless to all those cities? Poking wounds? Yes. No. _Yes_ , but no, it was more than that. Different than that. Putting herself in a cage she wasn’t in anymore. Wasn’t she in it anymore? Wasn’t she here still? Where else should she be?

She took her hair down, ran her hands through it.

What was it, why was she trying to press the Doctor’s, this not-Doctor Doctor’s, buttons? Her own buttons? Squeezing the good to make her own bad clearer? Shoving the Doctor to make her Master clearer? Pressing a spring to see how far it would jump back up? Was she kicking a rock over a fence to see whether it would get kicked back or to see whether there was a fence at all? The Doctor hadn’t jumped back up. And the Master... Well.

No gods, no masters. Right?

She’d been sinking for a while, surrounded by a fog that, no matter how many times she tried to clear the windows, left her muffled, stifled, muted. The cogs that had given her such clarity earlier floated slowly apart. Still turning. Uselessly now.

She remembered the feeling of it. Of her card being pulled out of the stack. Magic. But she didn’t know the trick. Just kept shuffling, kept dropping her deck.

* * *

When Timeless walked into the music room, _Missy_ found she was sitting on the floor, surrounded by what once had been a piano. All its components laid out in neat rows. She wasn’t sure when composition had become deconstruction. She pushed a white key into alignment and looked up. Timeless’s eyes went from Missy, to the piano, back to Missy.

“Need you to drive.”

* * *

On their next trip, having wandered apart and lost sight of one another, Missy found Timeless by the head of a statue flying through the stained glass windows of a local church. She pressed her lips together.

“That’s a _child!_ ” Missy heard as she walked through the doors. “That’s a child! You can’t raise it for sacrifice and build your religion on top of it!”

Timeless stood on a pew, smashed a long candle holder through another window, making it rain glass on herself.

“And that teaches what is _good?_ ” Her voice _bled._ “What is _right?!_ ” She jumped off the pew. “ _Find another job._ ”

She bumped into Missy as she ran out, but Missy wasn’t sure Timeless recognised her. She quietly closed the door behind her and let her eyes drift over the scene. Ripped curtains, fallen statues, glass everywhere. She wandered over to a light fixture on the wall.

“Oil?”

She glanced at the terrified pastor. He didn’t respond. She looked at the wooden pews, up at the wooden ceiling, the cold air streaming in through the holes where windows used to be.

“Bit of a fire hazard, hm?”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw body horror. and self-harm again. or like, self-harm by proxy i suppose

Back in the Tardis with smoke in her hair, Missy found Timeless sitting at the kitchen table, picking pieces of glass out of her arms.

Missy pulled out a chair and sat next to her, watched for a moment, and then started lining up the shards on the table. She pushed them around slowly with one finger while Timeless next to her dug her fingers into her own arm, fishing for remnants of broken worship.

The coloured pieces caught the kitchen light and glinted, beautiful. Beckoning. Missy licked her lips and imagined them between her teeth. Unforgiving. Imagined them swallowed, on a warpath of indifferent destruction, leaving a trail of carnage in her throat like she left one in the universe.

She imagined them, gracefully slow, carving through the delicate membranes that gave her form, that divided her _._ A slow and violent intrusion. She imagined her warm dark secrets meeting the cold harsh light of day in a spill. She imagined being put on display. She imagined being taken apart.

She imagined dark droplets, heavy with reluctant self-preservation, fluid with the desire to burst. She imagined them coating her throat, making her breath wet and bubbly, making her cough. She imagined them filling her mouth, drowning her tongue, speckling her teeth. She imagined bleeding.

A soft squish and a dribbled whine. Timeless dropped another piece of glass on the table. Careless. It bounced and disrupted the line, pushing a shard out of alignment, leaving bloody footprints where it met the table. Missy carefully pushed it across the table to join the end of the line.

She imagined it ending the first part of its fatal journey coming to rest in the dark hollow cavern of her stomach. She imagined it tearing holes in her walls. She imagined leaking. Her nose twitched.

Timeless’s bloodied fingers slipped off the piece of glass she’d been trying to pull out of herself and she dropped her head on the table. Defeated. Missy didn’t look away from her line of ruinous order.

She imagined the ghosts and rotting remains of everything she’d ever swallowed, contaminating her, suffusing her, overtaking her, mutating her. In her veins and bones and blood and marrow and skin. She was _shamelessly_ permeable.

She imagined bloodletting, purging, cleansing, absolving. She imagined being empty.

(forgiven)

She imagined being free.

Imagine being free.

She looked at Timeless, head on the table, given up, given in to the wounds, arms full of holes and glittering glass and leaking warm congealing self.

“Need some help with that?” Missy’s voice was crystalline. Betrayed no trace of thick, sick, bloody imaginings.

Timeless sat up, continued her task like she’d never stopped. Picking at the glass like a tongue at a tooth about to fall out. Like she didn’t quite want to let go of what was still part of her.

“Are you trying to pull it out or push it further in?”

Timeless stilled, didn’t look up but her softly trembling hand stayed hovering above a big shard of glass. Missy left her deconstructed kaleidoscope be to gently take Timeless’s wrist and pull her hand away. She lay her left hand on the Timeless’s arm and closed her right around the shard.

“I’ll do either. Just tell me which.”

No response.

“Tell me which.”

A breath, barely even a whisper, “Push.”

Missy pushed. Timeless’s fingers twitched, the muscles in her arm shifting, straining, under Missy’s hold. She adjusted her grip on the glass, pressed the Timeless’s arm into the table, and slowly carved a valley of flesh, pulling moans and gasps from her along the way.

They ignored Timeless’s struggling arms and restless feet and clenching fists as they leant into each other’s side.

Having reached the elbow, Missy removed the glass and put it on the table. Not in line. Not this one.

Timeless sat up and studied the river of blood overflowing its banks.

“See,” Missy said, “just needed a little wiggle.”

Timeless stared at it, dipped a finger into the orange pooling on the table.

“It looks the same.” She sounded subdued, disappointed in a way Missy understood.

“Yeah,” she whispered.

Timeless found her eyes and it took Missy by surprise how deep she could see into them. No dark reflections. She wondered what Timeless was seeing in her eyes. She blinked and looked away, about to stand up when, in a flash, Timeless had the shard and stuck it in Missy’s forearm. Already in motion, Missy effectively tore her own arm open. Unstoppable force meets immovable object; they did it together. She swore and looked at Timeless, who raised her chin triumphantly.

“Even,” she said.

Missy looked at her and then down at her own orange blood mingling with Timeless’s on the table. She exhaled.

“Even.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cw nonsexual nudity? but like, only implied? it's so vague im not even sure if it needs a content warning, im so bad at tagging, i hope i havent already messed it up somewhere. oh and death/dead body/decomposition imagery

They spent most of their time in shared spaces now. They didn’t always see each other, but they saw the traces of each other. Mugs of cold tea, books lying open, pillows migrating around couches, a wandering violin. Missy still had her private rooms, but she didn’t go there much anymore. They were cold, empty.

 _Even_ , seemed to have been a promise. _Everything you can do, I can do better._ For better and for worse. But lately, mostly better.

“Hungry?” got returned “Have you eaten?” got returned “I cooked.” got returned “Dinner’s ready.”

An intrusion of personal space without the intent of violence got returned as a cautious brush of hands, got returned as a tentative tangling of fingers, got returned with the daring decision to sit on the same couch _at the same time_ , got returned knee against thigh, head against shoulder, a shared blanket, a shared moment of stillness.

They weren’t quite sure when the two-person bedroom had popped up along the corridor that connected their separate wings, but they also hadn’t seen the need to expend many words on it.

And so watching someone wake up from a healing coma had turned into watching someone wake up from elusive sleep.

“Hello sleeping beauty.” Timeless’s voice was round and tender like soapstone. Deathless kept her eyes closed but couldn’t help smiling. Timeless snorted, a sound as warm and protective as the space under the covers. Deathless found her hands, weaved their fingers together, and only then she opened her eyes. Timeless beamed like the morning sun the Tardis made shine through their bedroom window. They traced their matching scars holding each other's eyes. Didn't need to look down to know what they weren't saying.

They didn’t like mirrors. Missy had smashed the ones on her side of the Tardis long ago, and she didn’t know what Timeless had done with hers, but she took great pains to avoid looking in the one in their bathroom. Lights out, back turned, did everything not to see.

Deathless hadn’t asked. Hadn’t asked whether Timeless’s reflection swirled smoke-like like hers did. Whether it played tricks, changed shape, sometimes up and left completely. She hadn’t asked. _Even._

She’d thrown a towel over the mirror and now their only reflections were the ones dancing between the bubbles on their soapy bathwater. They still swirled.

They sat opposite and beside each other, legs stretched out, watching each other until shampoo dripped stinging into their eyes, warping the world with pain.

Deathless’s slow decomposition, the rot that grew from her bones and disintegrated her, was delayed with every gentle touch of Timeless's. Where her skin met Deathless’s there was delineation, demarcation, individuation. Definition in exposition. Every nudge of her Time-twisted mind moulded a decaying body back into Deathless’s shape.

Missy let herself slip beneath the surface to wash her hair out, opened her mouth as if putrefaction could be helped with soap. When she came back up she saw through blurry vision a timeless body brimming with time mirroring her deathless body bursting with death.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw violent thoughts/urges

At times when she sat in the living room ostensibly reading, letting her eyes grow unfocused as she listened to her hearts push blood around, her chest move up and down mechanically, will-less persistence, purposeless perpetual motion, Timeless would bounce in, her mind weaving through Deathless’s even before she’d plucked the book from her hands and weaved their fingers together too.

She wouldn’t say anything but she’d take her to the garden, full of fragrant flowers and vibrant berry bushes. They’d wander around, listen to the birds sing and let the simulated sunlight warm their skin.

Sharp thoughts were as omnipresent as the thorns but if they were careful they could pick the blackberries and raspberries without getting pricked.

They’d lay in the grass with flowers in their hair, feeling warm and sweet. The blood on their hands only blackberry juice.

Lifeless mimicry.

In bed at night she didn’t even have that. Her veins full of tainted blood, her memories knives, and her hands gleamed clean and otherworldly in the simulated moonlight their Tardis shone through the fake bedroom window.

The indifferent stone walls echoed her shallow breaths back at her. She didn’t know what she expected when she tried the door but her knees gave out in relief when it ceded her passage, exit, _escape_.

Balancing on the edge of desperation – though she would have called it motivation – itching fingers fraying the hems of her pyjama shirt, she walked fast through distressingly empty corridors. Not even a loose screw to be found in the smooth metal of walls that kept bending in the wrong direction. Kept redirecting her, again and again.

She spared no energy to glare but shortcircuiting motherboards and nasty electrical fires joined the broken ribs and punctured organs floating around her mind.

When she walked into the music room for the _seventh_ _time_ , her motivation abruptly drained away and she slid down against the wall, scanning the instruments with blank eyes. She was resourceful. There was enough to work with. For starters, the piano. On the other end of the room, in pieces ready to be used for anything but their intended purpose. She got up, crossed the room to where she’d left the piano on the floor and found it impossibly whole.

Feeling like she was touching a ghost, she tentatively pressed a key. It didn’t disintegrate under her touch, it didn’t fall apart, it sounded...

She sat down. She dropped, where there just so happened to be a stool. Obscenely clean hands already moving. Her breath in time with the music and it almost seemed to have a point. Her thoughts stuttered, set in their violent ways, reluctant to assimilate into harmless harmonies. And they were stubborn, pervasive, woven through her underground, ready to spring up again from nothing the moment she stopped playing.

So she didn’t.

Kept her hands spinning melodies, enough to drown her thoughts, building dams to catch where she spilled, contain herself, maybe if she played long enough she’d collect enough to flush out from her self everything that wasn't her.

She only noticed she wasn’t alone anymore when the violin came in to support her. She faltered, breath and rhythm both, looked up in surprise and forgot to play. Timeless met her eyes only briefly before glancing at the piano and Deathless, Missy, remembered, listened, and met Timeless in the middle.

They danced without touching, saw without looking, spoke without speaking, said all the things that words didn’t exist for, all the things that didn’t have meaning, only feeling. The things that had sense, but couldn’t make it. The things too profane and too divine to be imagined, to be conceptualised, to be understood. The abject and the inextricable. The deathless and the timeless.

The blood, the blood, the blood.


	19. chrysalis

They sat cross-legged in the grass of the butterfly room, Deathless braiding Timeless’s hair, while Timeless pried apart the last pieces of an orange. Butterflies covered her hands and arms and the orange peels in her lap.

“–in fact, the chrysalis isn’t a shell at all,” she was saying, “it’s a hard skin that grows beneath the caterpillar’s actual skin before that falls off.”

Deathless looked at her wrist, hands, fingers tangled in Timeless’s hair. “Like a snake.”

“A bit like a snake moulding, yes, except snakes don’t liquefy.”

“Liquefy...”

“Not entirely. Some parts are left intact.”

“Which parts?” Deathless whispered.

Timeless shifted, the air around her stirred with a fractured rainbow of fluttering wings.

“But what’s interesting is that the butterflies actually remember–” Timeless shuddered, like a chilly breeze passing through leaves, before rapidly sinking into a stillness that had become as familiar to Deathless as the creaking of the bed and shifting of the covers in the morning. The waves of Timeless's mind flattened and one particularly vicious second lost its tenuous traction. “–remember, remember, remember, remember, remember–”

Deathless gave a sharp tug on Timeless’s hair. “ _Two._ ”

“– _remember_ ,” Timeless spat out, “what happened to them during their time as caterpillars.” She scrambled back onto less slippery ground, letting the butterflies resettle on her arms, and leaning back into Deathless’s hands, who put a hair tie around the braid she was making and let Timeless push her to the ground until she was being shamelessly used as a pillow.

She closed her eyes to the eternal sunlight. She let the heat and Timeless’s gentle babbling mollify her. Let the buzzing of insects outside replace the buzzing of thoughts inside. Became a clump of solid dirt like the grassy and flowered hill beneath her. She wondered distantly, a mild and gentle cloud of a thought, whether she’d ever be able to nourish life like that. Whether she could be vivid and vital and vibrant, or whether the corpses rotting in the ground of her lives past would only ever be pollutant, never fertiliser.

Timeless turned her head and pressed her ear into Deathless’s stomach. Deathless felt her two muted pulses bounce against the weight of Timeless’s head. Timeless found her hand in the grass and Deathless let her take it, allowed her own fingertips to explore soft and bumpy scarred skin, sticky with dirt and sweat and juice of an orange.

Noticing Timeless’s pulse under her fingers, Deathless abruptly sat up. _Pulse._

“Oi,” Timeless protested as she landed with her face in the grass. “What?”

Deathless took hold of both her wrists, pressing her thumb to the pulse points more firmly. “You’ve only got one heart working.”

Timeless sighed. “No,” she said simply, guiding Deathless’s hands to her chest. Left and right, both working, _s_ _ynchronised._ She pulled her hands away and frowned.

“How long have they been doing that?”

Timeless shrugged impatiently, agitated. “Always.” She pushed Deathless back down to use her as a pillow again. Deathless let her, her fingers finding Timeless’s uncanny pulse as her mind reached out to find its echo in Timeless’s head. A swelling, throbbing unison.

When Deathless brushed the contours of where Time tangled her mind, Timeless froze, her fist clenching under Deathless’s hand.

“You’re not even going to ask for permission?” Her voice like the surface tension on a drop of water.

“Figured you’d say no,” Deathless murmured, roaming the fraying threads of Timeless’s mind for a beginning. Timeless pulled her hand out from under Deathless’s, very deliberately grabbed Deathless’s index and middle finger, and started slowly but without hesitation bending them backward. Deathless lingered, letting Timeless’s time-full mind spin her dizzy and nauseous. She prodded until her fingers reached their limit. Timeless let go when Deathless backed off, settled back to just holding her hand.

Deathless waited until the universe stopped spinning and she could tell the difference between Then and Now again. Then she said, “We could untangle that.”

“Did I ask.” Timeless’s voice seemed to come from a distance, seemed heavy somehow. It landed as a weight on Deathless’s chest.

“You could feel Time again.”

“Time _less_ ,” Timeless said pointedly.

Deathless ran her fingers through Timeless’s hair as if she’d be able to feel the metaphysical bump on her head. “Seems like it hurts.”

Timeless snorted wryly. “It does.”

“Then why not?”

Timeless didn’t answer. Not for a long time. Deathless was watching the butterflies, had forgotten the question, when Timeless spoke again, her voice quiet and delicate, balancing on a precipice.

“When caterpillars... change, they leave behind all this... stuff. Waste, left over from their old body.” Silence fell as they watched a butterfly land on Timeless’s arm and sit there for a while, slowly flapping its wings, before taking off again.

“Butterflies leave their chrysalis,” Deathless said softly and kissed Timeless’s head.

Timeless hummed. “When they’re done.”


	20. Chapter 20

_When they’re done._

The thought came back again and again as Deathless watched Timeless pupate. As they swirled around each other within the safe hard shell of their Tardis. As they dissolved and solidified into new selves that melted just as quickly. As they burrowed themselves warm cocoons under heavy covers of shared beds, under fostering sunlight in soft grass, under forgiving water of bubbly baths.

_When they’re done._

Timeless would walk around the console sometimes, fingers tracing switches like her hands were reenacting a memory, eyes far away. She didn’t seem to notice the silent tears streaming down her face.

From the edge of the room Deathless would watch her, one of the shadows, unnoticed. When Timeless eventually looked up, it was startled, trembling, wide-eyed, like she’d heard something, like something had caught her attention. She’d meet Missy's eyes so unerringly that you’d be forgiven for thinking she’d known Missy was there the entire time. She hadn’t, of course. Missy knew so the moment she looked into those big, round, glassy eyes. Eyes that would look better in blue.

Sometimes she wasn’t sure whether this person she was travelling with was who she thought it was. Whether this wasn’t a Lumiat sort of situation and she’d got stuck with the bad copy, the taxidermied version of her friend. But then she’d look at Missy with those helpless eyes filled with tears, and Missy could see through the cracks like fault lines behind Timeless’s eyes an entire person, locked away. Tangled in knots that weren’t remotely as tender as silk.

Missy would shoot forward, give her a little push and kick a foot out from under her, so that when the Doctor’s knees gave out, it seemed like Missy were to blame.

Missy would catch her, dip her, and when the Doctor had blinked the startlement away, the eyes that met Missy’s were sharp, looked great in red and, despite her wet cheeks, had never cried a tear in their life.

The Doctor would laugh, loud and genuine, and Missy understood this to be the alchemy of feelings. She’d smile all the same. _Her_ smiles had always been golden; they matched now.

And anyway, was the wine any less intoxicating because it was turnt from water?

No.

And Missy would drink the alchemy wine. And some actual wine too, now that she was thinking about it.

“Don’t like wine,” the Doctor complained.

“Because you have no taste,” Missy said as she pulled her up and they stood face to face, chest to chest.

“Do too!”

Missy raised an eyebrow. “What would you drink?”

“Banana daiquiri,” was the immediate answer.

Missy snorted and spun her around. “Like I said.”

“I like _you_ ,” Timeless scoffed.

Something in Missy flickered out. She smirked, but her eyes were dead. “Do you now?”

“So what does that say?” Timeless pressed.

“That you’re losing this argument, dear.”

They broke apart and Timeless gestured at the console. “Pick a place.”

“What?”

“Somewhere they have drinks and dancing!" Timeless called as she bounded up the stairs in the direction of the wardrobe hall.


	21. hall of mirrors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> seeing as this entire fic is from missy's pov, we get a view of the timeless child abuse thats really skewed toward missy as a victim, which is,, obviously not who she is. shes a victim but shes not the main victim of this. but we're in her pov, we're in her head, we're only ever seeing things from HER perspective. so, shes the victim, the doctor gets deified, etc. these are not necessarily things that are true from a more "objective" balanced perspective. but we dont get that perspective. we only get her warped mind. 
> 
> i think if you got this far, youre probably on board with that but just as a warning, this chapter leans pretty strongly on the missy is a victim thing. theyre both victims, theyre both victims in this chapter, but if you need the master to be like, shut up because theyre always making themself the victim, then you might not like this. alright. disclaimer over
> 
> oh also cw for like some death imagery, like dead bodies, but it's mild. but there's also the feeling of being a dead body, idk what that is, somewhere in the camp of dissociation depersonalisation probably. jsyk

“You’re going to wear a suit to the court of Versailles?” Missy asked, leaning against the doorframe of the wardrobe.

The Doctor turned around. “You can’t see me yet!”

Missy snorted. “We’re not getting married.”

“No, but it ruins the surprise,” the Doctor muttered, turning back to the mirror, trying to figure out how to tie a bow tie. She met Missy’s eyes in the mirror. “You gonna make me change?”

Missy walked up and took the tie out of her hands. “Wouldn’t dare.”

“Think it’ll attract attention?” the Doctor asked, watching Missy's deft hands.

“Your outfits never fail to,” Missy said, straightening the tie.

The Doctor grinned at her, cocking her head like someone who knew exactly what they were doing. “Well, I dress to impress.”

Missy smirked and took a step back, crossing her arms. “Oh is that what you’re doing? Never realised.”

The Doctor pried her arms apart, intertwining their fingers, whispering in her ear, “Then why did it work?”

Missy scoffed, taking another step back but letting the Doctor hold on to her hands. “ _Please_. You wish you impressed me.”

“Oh ouch. That would be check.”

“Would be?”

“You forgot one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I know you to be a liar.”

“Ah.”

Timeless grinned. “Yes.”

“But so are you.”

“Guess that’s true.”

“Checkmate, then.”

“ _Stale_ mate.”

“Rematch?”

“Let’s dance.”

They waltzed into the palace of the Sun King like they were invited. Like they _sent_ the invitations. The Doctor stayed one step behind while Missy talked the guard into letting them pass. She felt the Doctor’s eyes on her, her hand squeezing hers, and her mind, giggly like a school girl’s, tickling Missy’s. They exchanged glances, suppressing grins as they got announced as le Docteur et la Maîtresse and led to the Hall of Mirrors.

They made their peculiarity a curiosity, were adored instead of mistrusted or shunned. Accepted drinks and food and gifts and smiles. Made men jealous and women flock around them. Until they had enough. Then suddenly all the guests lost interest and left them alone to do whatever they wanted. Which was drinking as much as they wanted, eating as much as they wanted, and dancing _as much as they wanted._

They spun and twirled, followed and watched by their thousands of reflections, inescapable. Timeless shone golden with the light reflecting off of crystals and mirrors and jewellery and in a room full of candle light and music and people, Deathless went slowly cold. Her blood turning slow and thick, her skin coming loose, the faces looking back at her from the mirror grey.

Timeless caught her eyes, which must be cloudy and lifeless by now, and with one smooth spin started pulling her along, weaving through crowds, toward the exit.

Hand in hand they ran, through empty corridors, echoing walls giving them back their panting breaths like the ghosts of a thousand past lives. Endlessly they ran, the halls ever extending, the doors at the end a mirage, until Timeless put a hand against them and they swung open obediently under her touch. She led Deathless through vine-covered archways to a clearing, a small field, surrounded by trees and low brick walls, safely out of sight.

They collapsed in the grass, Deathless caught between Timeless’s warm living weight and the clammy stagnant dirt. Its cold dampness wormed its way through her dress, cooling her skin, chilling her bones, and she knew that if she exhaled now, the ground would claim her.

Timeless, with life in her eyes and fire in her mouth and hair full of sunlight brighter than the stars keeping watch overhead, shone radiant above her. Deathless closed her eyes when Timeless kissed her. Tried not to choke on the Light and Life and Time that filled her. Liquid fire flooded her nerves at the Contact, catastrophic and nourishing, crawling, wriggling, oozing through the tears of her decaying flesh, stitching it back together, looming her into a mesh of Death and Time, the wicked and the nice, the foul and the sanctified, an unholy tapestry.

Squeezing her eyes shut didn’t stop the many, _many,_ more than two thousand years of Time lighting up her brain like fireworks. A tidal wave of memories accompanied by the crackling snaps of the breaking bonds of a mind permitting itself to exist again.

She gasped when Timeless broke away, chasing her warmth with freezing lips and her life with skeletal hands.

“Timeless,” she breathed, almost a laugh, almost a scoff at the irony of the name.

“Yes?” she whispered, fevered and sweet.

“ _Liar,_ ” Deathless hissed, and took Timeless’s burning face in her disintegrating hands, asking her, willing her, begging her, to save her from this body that wanted to become soil.

Timeless obliged, bowed down willingly, and Deathless drank from her the life she was lacking, the abundance Timeless had of it.

Timeless’s hands on her face pushed her skin back in place, Timeless's fingers trailing her arms forced her muscles to hang on. Her bones rattled and her stomach howled and for once Koschei understood her hunger.

And she ate. She swallowed the Child’s lives until she was sick and didn’t stop even then. She filled herself with gold, bursting veins thrumming against her splitting skin, these lives, this blood, this breath, this gold. One, two, three, four.

She’d been wrong. Skin doesn’t want to open. Only dead skin, only ripe skin, only dead skin wants to rip, pressured by its hidden putrid insides.

When she’d taken all she could and it was still not enough, she pushed Timeless off of her and finally opened her eyes. In the wet grass, under cover of night, two glittering eyes met hers; Timeless lay still glowing golden. Deathless exhaled a bitter breath and made to turn away, the first crime she’d ever wanted to avert her eyes from. Sour shame.

With a brush of her fingers over her cheek, Timeless stopped her. “Don’t.”

The words – unimaginable words. Words that none of those faces in the mirrors, none of those ghosts, had ever even _thought_ – as if in response, shaken loose, dug up out of the bog in reaction to all that gold, to seeing her, to having the temerity to look at her like this, incandescent, rushed themselves out of Deathless’s mouth: “ _I’m sorry._ ”

Like a hiccough, like a cough, like a puff of regeneration smoke in the air between them: “ _I’m sorry._ ”

Like an obstruction pulled from the walls of her throat with bare fingers, like something that should’ve been said from the beginning, like the words that were impossible to find to an injustice impossible to remember: “ _I’m sorry._ ” For what was taken, for what I took from you.

Timeless’s eyes glittered big and round and only now Deathless saw the tears. Timeless sat up and took Deathless’s hands, turning them over in hers, keeping her eyes down. Deathless followed, listening, watching, both of them trembling.

“ _You_ didn’t take anything from me,” Timeless said carefully, followed by a sharp, shaky breath that didn’t seem entirely in her control. “And I–” another breath, “–I _gave_ you.”

Now she looked up, and she took Deathless’s face between her hands and kissed her, slowly and ever so tenderly, and a bit of the cold in Deathless’s bones went away. “I _gave_ you.”

Deathless sighed and took Timeless face in her hands too, brought their heads together. Timeless’s mind gave way, open and fluid, warm waves welcoming her. It was resonant and dynamic. No empty wasteland, no dried up fragments of broken memories, no throbbing knot.

She brushed away Timeless’s tears. Not to erase them, but to hold them, to share them. They were replenished by more soft waves gushing from Timeless’s full mind.

“Does it hurt?” Deathless asked. Not because she didn’t know the answer.

A trembling sigh and more tears for Deathless to hold. “My hearts,” her voice broke softly, “are bleeding.”

“My hearts are bloodless,” Deathless whispered.

“Isn’t it always the way.” 

“I wish I could bleed like you.”

“I think you do.”

Timeless created space between them, moved her hands from Deathless’s face to her arms, and Deathless would have protested if she weren't still held close, enveloped in warm gentle waves of Timeless's acceptance.

Deathless opened her eyes to watch Timeless’s fingers trace the scars on Deathless's arms. “It’s not the same.”

“No?” Timeless looked up. After a moment of consideration, she said, “I wish I could love like you do.” Her voice danced a melody of reverence and admiration.

Deathless felt breakable. “I think you do.”

The Doctor shook her head. “Everything I’ve done to you, I wouldn’t have done if I loved like you do.”

“No,” the Master agreed, “you would have done everything that I have done to you instead.”

They held eye contact and Deathless shuddered, shaking her head, pulling back. “I don’t want this, I don’t want to _be_ this.”

Timeless sought her eyes, gentle hands coming to rest on Deathless’s arms, a firm and reassuring weight. “I don’t want to be this either, but it’s not our choice, is it?”

“It is, it can be.” Eyes wide with terrified hope. Scared of a yes and scared of a no.

“ _Koschei_ ,” Timeless said, heavy like a promise, prayer, plea, momentarily caught. Between what, Deathless couldn’t say, words, memories, understanding. Then she took Deathless into her arms, held her like an apology, cosmic absolution, something that could rewrite timelines.

“We can end this,” Deathless tried again, face in Timeless’s neck, weak resistance against the tenderness that was telling her body what shape to be, and how to be alive. Where their skin met there was definition. Clarity.

“We don’t have to end _us_ ,” Timeless whispered.

Deathless broke, as if with the snapping of all her ribs, she slumped, pushed Timeless away. “You want to exist as _this_?”

Timeless sniffed, swiftly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “With you? _Yes._ ”

“You wouldn’t be this if it weren’t for me!”

“I don’t want to be whatever I would have been without you!”

“I’d rather be _dead_ ,” Deathless spit.

“You’d rather be dead than be–”

“What we are? Yes!”

Timeless looked at her still, wide eyes heartbroken. More tears that Deathless didn’t catch for her, and a silent question. Deathless averted her eyes for the second time that night, looked down at her rotten hands twisting in her lap.

“It’s, it’s rotten,” she stammered, “I’m rotting.”

She wanted to hold her hands up in demonstration but before she could soft hands full of grace took them. She tried not to flinch, shrink, pull away. With a gentle touch to her chin, Timeless requested Deathless meet her eyes. She didn’t, and then she did. And when she did, Timeless firmly shook her head. “No.”

She blinked and Deathless watched two tears filled with starlight fall down to earth.

“No, you are not.”

She took Deathless’s face in her hands and brushed her thumbs over her cheeks.

“You are not. You are not a pollutant, you’re not a poison.”

Deathless closed her eyes, a wellspring pricked, a vein opened. Timeless caught her tears.

“You’re no corruption, you’re no virus, you’re no sickness.”

She kissed the top of Deathless’s head. Mouth full of mute screams, Deathless shook with ragged sobs. And for once she understood why she was crying.

“You know how to live in the darkness but that doesn’t make you dark. You’ve been made sick but that doesn’t mean you are sickness. You are not Sick, and you are not Wrong, and you are not Bad.”

“I–” Deathless gasped between sobs, “am not, Good!”

“Of course not,” Timeless said, pulling her close, “of course you’re not.” A shiver ran through Deathless. “But neither am I. We don’t have to be.”

Deathless snorted, gasping for breath. “ _That’s_ a first.”

Timeless rested her head against Deathless’s. “I know. I _know_ , and I’m sorry. I’m slow, you know that I’m slow, but I get there in the end.”

 _Bit late_ , was the sardonic response somewhere in the back of Missy’s mind, but her spikes were wrapped up in layers of the Doctor warm and close and holding her. Her acceptance, her acceptance.

“So you got there then,” Missy asked, pressing her ear to the Doctor’s chest to hear her four heartbeats, “Doctor?”

“No,” the Doctor whispered slowly, “I don’t think so. Let’s stick with Timeless.”

“Well then,” Missy said, “ _Timeless_.” She pushed away to look her in the eyes. “I’ll be Deathless. We’ll _match_.” She smiled.

Timeless beamed like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Deathless stood up, feeling her body, her self, click into place, into sense, and reached a hand out to Timeless. Timeless took it and jumped up. “Want to get out of here?”

Deathless nodded.

“As you wish, my lady.”

Deathless rolled her eyes, held onto Timeless’s hand, felt her hearts beat strong and lively, and they went to find their way out of the gardens.

It took them until sunrise to find their Tardis again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please dont factcheck me i did not try to make this accurate in literally Any respect. this is such pure wish fulfillment on Every level, you gotta just go with it or leave it tbh
> 
> i started this fic off because i wanted to get 13 and missy in a room together to make them kiss again and then i severely traumatised them instead. alright canon traumatised them, i just picked up the pieces and shuffled them a bit. but we got there! i got them there in the end! they had to suffer for it though. feels like some kind of reverse bury your gays. make your gays suffer to earn that kiss. and by gays i mean me


	22. Chapter 22

Timeless was different after that. Her presence layered itself from one sheet of tulle to a full petticoat. She filled the air, fizzing and swishing, histories unfolding and memories reasserting their existence in the space between them.

But the spinning of her mind didn’t stop, just changed its focus. Internal to external. Smoking brain to smoking console.

Timeless yelped as sparks from the console jumped into her hair and she scrambled to put out the fire.

“I’d set you on fire too if you did that to me,” Deathless said, looking at the console, taken apart and spread all over the room as if a child had played operation on their teddy bear. “What did you _do_ to her?”

“Just some upgrades,” Timeless said casually, putting her hands back into the tangle of wires that was a proven fire hazard. The Tardis groaned.

“I think someone disagrees.”

“Sometimes to make things better you have to make them a bit worse first.” Timeless looked at the deconstructed console and added, “It looks worse than it is.”

The Tardis made a loud noise of disagreement and Deathless took a closer look at the... _upgrades_.

Absence detectors looped into telepathic buffers. Distress signal receivers connected to the Defence Indefinite Timeloop Option. Photon accelerator coils trying to play nice with assimilation contrastors. The contraption wouldn’t work the way it was clearly intended to, but the intention was what concerned Deathless more than the confusing engineering. She stood in front of Timeless and held out her hands. Timeless looked at them for a moment before sighing, putting her screwdriver down, and taking them.

“If they find us, they find us,” Deathless said, not unkindly, doing her best to smooth the sharp edges of fear and resentment off her voice.

Timeless closed her eyes, shaking her head. “No– _No,_ we can–”

“There is no place in the universe,” Deathless interrupted, “that is out of their reach.”

Timeless dropped her head against Deathless’s shoulder and Deathless was just about to be surprised at the easy victory when Timeless looked up again, eyes wide and glimmering with a very ill-considered idea.

“We’ll go out!”

Deathless frowned. “...out where?”

“Out of the universe!” Timeless said, a little breathlessly, squeezing Deathless’s fingers.

Deathless flew through a series of thoughts and then landed exactly where Timeless already was. Timeless saw it in her eyes and nodded eagerly.

“That’s– We don’t–," Deathless stammered. "There’s no way to survive that.”

“It’s a risk,” Timeless admitted. “We’ve survived worse.”

That was a train of thought Deathless didn’t want to get on.

“We don’t know where it is, was, if it’s even still there.”

“The information is in the Matrix!”

Timeless hadn’t thought this through. “Yes,” Deathless said, “and how do we get it out?”

“We’ll–!” Timeless went quiet as the realisation dawned. She bounced slowly on her feet, looking down at their joined hands. “We can go in one more time,” she said with a nonchalant shrug and half of a brave smile that faded quickly. “Can’t we?”

Could they? The two of them together. With each other, for each other. Could they?

Deathless considered. Considered the hands in hers. Considered falling from a great height into the unknown. Considered home, and its flames in her veins. Considered a universe so full of twisted pasts that they looped around to being future, looming in the dark, in the light, in the corner of her eye, of her mind, waiting. Waiting for her to make a mistake, trip, a moment of inattention, to tangle her in their ropes again.

And she imagined. Imagined falling from a great height into the unknown. Imagined home, hidden behind a purple veil. Imagined a universe of fresh snow, not yet disturbed by the paths of their criscrossing footsteps. A universe free of ghosts, of corpses, of corruption. A universe empty. A clean slate.

She looked into Timeless’s eyes. Hopeful, trusting eyes.

A universe free...

Deathless imagined being free.

“ _Yes_ ,” she said, inhaling sharply. “We can do it one more time.”

* * *

Easier said than done.

Gallifrey wasn’t hard to find, neither was the Matrix chamber. What _was_ hard to find was enough courage to step in.

They stood on the edge of the Matrix, leaning forward, hand in hand, silent, for ages. Entire star systems got born and burned out in the space of their limbo.

Timeless giggled. Deathless stepped back quickly, not about to be dragged into the abyss by _someone_ losing their balance to a giggle fit.

“ _What,_ ” she snapped.

Timeless looked at her, eyes glimmering with a very untimely glee. “Coward,” she mouthed, holding Deathless’s eyes.

Deathless’s nose twitched. “Hypocrite,” she returned.

Timeless grinned. “On three?”

Deathless stepped forward. “One.”

Timeless stilled, looking into the Matrix and adjusting her grip on Deathless’s clammy hand. “Two.”

Their hearts beat in unison. “ _Three._ ”

Deathless closed her eyes as they fell.

* * *

They stood in front of their Tardis, looking up at the Boundary that the– that Timeless had originally come through.

“Purple,” Timeless muttered.

“Yes,” Deathless breathed. She tore her eyes away from the mesmerising swirl above them and looked around.

“What?” Timeless asked, following her gaze.

“Nothing. There’s no one.”

Timeless swallowed and met Deathless’s eyes. Unspoken question.

Deathless sighed. Ready to be unmade, unspun?

“No,” Timeless whispered, shaking her head. That’s not what this was. They weren’t unravelling themselves; they were binding off, casting off, taking the needles out, and seeing what they actually looked like. Deathless saw her reflection in Timeless’s eyes, and nodded. “Yes.”

They piloted their Tardis together, flew her carefully closer to the crack in the skin of the universe, watched the pulsing purple light bleed onto their console room floor through the open doors.

The Tardis rumbled and chirped, didn’t seem as opposed to the idea of sailing off the end of the world and toppling down into the unknown as they had expected. She helped them, nudged them upright when they started tilting, carefully steered them with strategically lit up buttons. They didn’t question her suggestions and put their hands where she asked them to.

The closer they hovered, the more the other universe started to sing around them. Buzzing in the air, resonating in the walls. It drew them in, magnetic. Deathless thought of sirens, ships, sharp rocks hidden beneath deceptively gentle waves. But then she looked at Timeless, vibrant, wide-eyed, bathed in purple, and if they'd failed in this one, maybe the next universe would be the one they would see every star in.

Deathless took Timeless's hand, Timeless pulled the dematerialisation lever, and with a bang to end a universe, Timeless and Deathless left what they had been and sprang into a new universe Time and Death.


End file.
